If the current melting trend continues, and everything seems to indicate that it will, the La Maladeta glacier, one of the last symbols of permanent ice in the Pyrenees, "may disappear at the end of the next decade, as has already happened." happened with other glaciers," explains Adrián Martínez Fernández, specialized technician responsible for the Digital Cartography and 3D Analysis Laboratory of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH) and leader of a new study on Pyrenean glaciers whose results have been published in the Land Degradation magazine
The results obtained in this research show an average speed of retreat of the glacier front of more than 50 meters in a decade (5 m/year) and average ice thickness losses of about 7 m (-0.7 m/year) in just 10 years, as well as the disappearance, between 2019 and 2020, of the almost two hectares (20,000 m2) of glacier surface measured in the first campaign in 2010.
“If this pace continues, it is estimated that the Maladeta Aragonese glacier could disappear at the end of the next decade, as has already happened with other glaciers. More than 60% of the Pyrenean glaciers that existed in the middle of the 19th century have already been lost,” says Adrián Martínez Fernández.
The systematic observation of glaciers has been of special interest for decades due to its connection with the global climate system. Understanding the behavior of these environments, sensitive to climate variability, helps to understand and model climate change. However, the generation of quantitative data in temperate high mountain environments such as the Pyrenees is not as common as in other European mountainous regions.
Information about this glacier in the Aragonese Pyrenees has been obtained from the application of geomatic techniques to document the ice and snow surface of its glacial front. Techniques that have evolved, like the glacier, in the 10 years of monitoring, with different equipment: total stations, GNSS devices, terrestrial laser scanners and drones.
The research group began the measurements with traditional topographic equipment such as total stations, but in recent campaigns drones have become more prominent, allowing much more detailed and extensive information to be recorded on the glacier front, "we have obtained relevant information on the degradation of the cryosphere in the high Pyrenean mountains, with a precision and detail uncommon in the study of glaciers for such a long time", comments Adrián Martínez Fernández.
This study, funded through the ministerial projects CGL2015-68144-R and PID2020-113247RB-C21, is the result of collaboration between CENIEH and the Recognized Natural Heritage and Applied Geography Research Group (GIR PANGEA) of the University of Valladolid , which with the support of the University of Extremadura has led the monitoring work since 2010. Along with them, researchers from the universities of Cantabria, León, the Basque Country and the CSIC Pirenaico Institute of Ecology have participated.
